I will not choke on failure!

After upgrading to Natty 11.04, my gvim open dialog became more flaky. In before “:tabnew” and “:split” bashing, I am a noob so pardon my familiarity with Open dialog.

The Problem: Whenever I open gvim from shell and initiate the Open file dialog then try to open a directory, it doesn’t open the directory and the busy cursor is display. And it just stuck there like forever. Also, oxygen-appmenu caused Gvim to be unresponsive whenever you click on the menu.

The Workaround: Run gvim in foreground, so it will not fork and detach from the shell it was started in. ‘gvim -f <filename>’ or ‘gvim –nofork <filename>’

Personally I modified my .bashrc to create a new alias for gvim as follow: alias gvim=’gvim -f’

[Rant]
Deja vu. When Ubuntu first introduced PulseAudio, it was one hell of a plight for the end-user. And now it is Plymouth turn to make life an uphill struggle for user with recent ATI or NVIDIA card and proprietary drivers (as well as people having examination like me >.<). Here is an interesting article by Scott James Remnant on why your expensive card doesn’t play nice with Plymouth in Lucid. I also grow tired and wary of all the copy-n-paste instructions lying on the Internet which are out-dated and untested yet considered as panacea. My most hated one is ‘set gfxpayload=keep’ originated from Arch forum and now spreading like fire. It makes your the Virtual Terminal (VT) useless, ‘keep’ is not the working option in Ubuntu, last and not least, in Lucid, there is a more graceful way to do it. And I hope my guide below will not suffer the same fate as them. It was quite comprehensive after days of manual grinding and testing during exam period.

[Problems/Symptoms/Why-Are-You-Here]
Plymouth splash screen…

is in low res mode.

has corrupted graphic

is decent but can’t switch to virtual terminal or VT is horribly in low res mode

is decent but the splash screen only appears for a brief 1-2 second ( you are missing the dots moving :P), before that you only see a black/blank screen

[Environment]
Use Synaptic or ‘apt-cache policy ‘ or common-sense to find out.

GRUB >= 1.98-1ubuntu5

Plymouth >= 0.8.2-2

ATI cards with FGLRX >= 8.723.1-0ubuntu3

NVIDIA cards with nvidia-glx-1*

A clean without other tweaks to plymouth & grub, please revert them before proceeding. Really, it will not work if you insisted on apply other tweaks. !!! IMPORTANT !!!

Common-sense and google searching skill

A bit of risk taking spirit and confidence

[Caveats and Limitations]
I will use the uvesafb to fix all the problems mentioned above but I have to warn you about certain limitations first. They don’t affected me much though (widescreen works on mine). I think problem will come when you want to use solar theme or any complex theme as uvesafb doesn’t have acceleration -> slow. Extract from documentation for uvesafb

uvesafb is a _generic_ driver which supports a wide variety of video cards, but which is ultimately limited by the Video BIOS interface. The most important limitations are:
– Lack of any type of acceleration.
– A strict and limited set of supported video modes. Often the native or most optimal resolution/refresh rate for your setup will not work with uvesafb, simply because the Video BIOS doesn’t support the video mode you want to use. This can be especially painful with widescreen panels, where native video modes don’t have the 4:3 aspect ratio, which is what most BIOS-es are limited to.
– Adjusting the refresh rate is only possible with a VBE 3.0 compliant Video BIOS. Note that many nVidia Video BIOS-es claim to be VBE 3.0 compliant, while they simply ignore any refresh rate settings.

Also, uvesafb replaces vesafb in Ubuntu, in case you are wondering.

[Fix/Workaround]
* uvesafb required v86d package to be installed. Hwinfo package is required for the next step as well.sudo apt-get install v86d hwinfo

* Find out the supported resolution by using hwinfo.sudo hwinfo --framebuffer

* Edit /etc/default/grub to make sure we boot with uvesafb framebuffer. For the mode_option parameter change to your native screen resolution you see from running the above comment (if not just set to 1024×768-24 which is safest. Oh, Netbook user – please exercise some common-sense here) Non relevant lines are omitted for clarity.
...
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset video=uvesafb:mode_option=1366x768-24,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap"
...
GRUB_GFXMODE=1366x768

* Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules to include uvesafb by adding the following line.
uvesafb mode_option=1366x768-24 mtrr=3 scroll=ywrap

* Now reboot and enjoy the high resolution sensation 🙂 (my first reboot hangs, but 2nd time onward it works flawlessly). If it works correctly, you should be able to have moving dots with the splash screen; lesser time of blank screen and much more time with splash screen.

* And contrary to popular belief, my laptop resume and suspend works with uvesafb! 🙂

* No splash screen but high resolution virutal terminal using EFI framebuffer. Edit /etc/default/grub, remove ‘splash’ option and replace the two entries below with your native resolution. Seriously, this is way better than setting the payload to keep and in 00_header. GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX is only available from grub 1.98 in lucid.
...
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"
...
GRUB_GFXMODE=1366x768
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=1366x768
...

[Last Words]
– Comments are welcome and appreciated.
– Testers are welcome.
– I will try to respond to you ASAP but spare me some thoughts cos the poor guy here is having his final exams at his university life 🙂

If you are upgrading to Amarok 2.3 Clear Light and experiencing crashes, weird behaviour in layout, CD can’t be played. Then you can take few bold steps as I suggested below.

Note to self: once there is a major update, wipe clean the previous version completely.

Wipe out your config and application layout and database.

mv .kde/share/apps/amarok/ ~
mv .kde/share/config/amarok* ~

You lose all your playlist, cover arts, etc… but Amarok works amazingly well again. You can try putting the config/database back one by one. Though I don’t bet on that. Wipe config alone will not give you a functional Amarok you have to kill apps/amarok as well, like in my case, layout isn’t remembered and new scanned tracks got weird random tag from random existing track.

Due to time constraint and burden from school work, I decided to forgo learning about making deb changes and upload to ppa. Apologize for it. This post will be a quick post on how to get firefox 3.6 without font rendering issues due to lcdfiltering and no –enable-system-cairo flag with official build.

Then grab a cup of coffee and wait till the build is complete. Then in your ff-cairo folder will have a list of *.deb. If you have already installed ff3.6 from the stable repo, then just double click firefox_3.6+nobinonly-0ubuntu5~mfs~karmic1_i386.deb and choose option to reinstall it. Then restart firefox and VOILA, your font smooth and crisp again ;P. If vanilla, then I am not sure (no time again)… but should be the branding package and the above package.

Will update this guide proper when I have some free-time =/

If you really trust me and want my compiled debs, drop me a message. And I will upload to mediafire or megaupload.

Unlike its brother (Ubuntu’s Printer Configuration), Kubuntu Printer Configuration itself is quite obscure in setting Authentication/Credential. There isn’t a dialog for you to change your authentication, also there is no verify button like its brother. In order to change our credential, we have to change the Device URI. Don’t worry, after you apply it, the username and password will be hidden from the URI.

Also your username and password must conform to URL encoding standard meaning, if your password contain says space or @, you have to replace it with %20 and %40 accordingly (h4x0r@ will be h4x0r%40 when you type in the device URI). There is no automatic conversion for you 😦 . More on special characters on URL encoding http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm

And KPackagekit will complain about whenever you want to refresh repo cache or download packages whenever you change ISP. My home and university use different ISP. Anyway, //:8080 is definitely wrong for proxy address.

Modify this part as below and your KPackagekit will be good to go again.